Recently, IFE as coordinator together with other 19 partners has been granted a 3.5-year EU Horizon Research and Innovation Action project, called Encase (A European Network of Research Infrastructures for CO2 Transport and Injection)
Through Encase, we’ll improve the technical capacity of 7 world-leading CCS-related research infrastructures (RIs) with state-of-the-art scientific instruments, tools and methods to be the backbone for research and development of CCS technologies. Among those RIs, six are part of ECCSEL ERIC including FALCON facility. The co-development of these technologies will take place in close cooperation between industry and academia, creating a unique capacity-building environment to support the industrial European competitiveness, increase RI personnel’s competence and enable these RIs to close key knowledge gaps.
FALCON – IFE’s Flow Assurance Loop for CO2 transport in pipeliNes
FALCON is a versatile flow assurance loop for studying important CO2 transport and well injection phenomena. The test facility contributes to safe and cost-effective CO2 transport by:
- Providing high-quality experimental data used for modelling and validation of pipeline simulators
- Testing relevant instruments and equipment
The FALCON CO2 flow loop has a typical multiphase flow, closed loop design. FALCON has been the key flow loop for several major CCS related JIPs and research infrastructure projects since it is built in 2010; such as CO2VIP (CO2 OLGA Verification and Improvement Project) and CO2FACT (CO2 Flow Assurance for Cost-effective Transport, project no. 618052). Various types of tests have been carried out using FALCON loop to provide unique data to the relevant scenarios of operation, emergency and commissioning of the CO2 pipeline and injection wells, like two-phase flow, depressurization, wellhead choking, fluid hammer, shut-in, restart, etc.
FALCON became an ECCSEL ERIC facility in 2020 and has been upgraded in a project of ECCSEL Research Infrastructure for Norwegian Full-Scale CCS (ECCSEL-NFS, project no. 296486). In 2022, a new type of test has been performed to study the terrain-induced instability (also called severe slugging) in CO2 system in a JIP called PUSCO (Phenomenology study of unstable two-phase CO2 flow in a pipeline system, project no. 326624). Tests for transient-induced instability and flashing-induced instability are planned for 2023 and 2024 in PUSCO using FALCON loop.
Read more about the Encase project here: Institute for Energy Technology on LinkedIn: #horizoneurope #ife #co2 #co2transport #co2storage #research #greendeal…
